TOPIC: Horror on the Orient Express - All Rotations

III THE LONG VERSION

Saturday 23rd February 1923

Headline News
Walking past a newspaper kiosk on a busy Victoria platform, a newspaper headline catches Cartwright’s only eye. He picks it up, unfolds the sheet and reads.



Bill the Cabbie
Exiting Victoria, a scruffy cab driver holds up a sign with the name “Macrat” on it. Ludwig tells the man he’s Makryat and asks where they’re going. Bill the Cabbie is to take us to 3 Brophy Lane, Islington—the address of Mehmet Makryat’s antique shop. The cab is a horse-drawn, four-wheeled Hackney. Big enough for six. In the cab we are all knocked out by a sleep-inducing drug.

A Different London
When we wake, London is blanketed in a wet, grey fog. The cab door is open and our cabbie is gone. So is our stuff—the Simulacrum, the scrolls and (to Ludwig’s dismay) the Mims Sahis. We find ourselves standing before a wrought iron gate. Beyond it, the cityscape is dominated by a cathedral with numerous spires, all reaching towards the purple-black sky above us. A page boy invites us to follow him across this strange London. We have been invited to see the Duc.

The Cathedral
Inside, the cathedral is vast. Black marble pillars stretch away from the west door entrance to the further end of the cathedral interior at the edge of our sight. The Duc is waiting for us at the high alter, outlined by the coloured twilight that peeps through the tall stained-glass windows. He wears fine robes of state and a gold mask which at certain angles appears to have the visage of a young boy floating across its otherwise smooth surface. As we approach, he raises his hand in benediction and bids us welcome, and invites us to eat. A table laden with a feast of roasts, sweet meats and wine materialises before us. We’re hungry. We eat and drink. Letty toasts the Duc’s health with a goblet of wine. Father Mika is the only one who refuses all refreshment, citing the whole place is an affront to God.

A Reminder of the Deal
The Duc speaks in a resigned and languid manner. We made a deal, but we haven’t delivered the goods. The Duc grows tired of us. He reminds us of our bargain: The Simulacrum and the scrolls, for our lives. We remind the Duc we asked for healing from our afflictions. Alas, the Scroll of the Left Hand (that which contains the Ritual of Cleansing to relieve us of our sufferings) is not in our possession, or his. He insists he never agreed to it anyway.

Delivery Instructions
We are to deliver the Simulacrum and the scrolls tomorrow at sunset to the barrow on Hamstead Heath. We are to leave the items on the ancient mound and leave. Cartwright spoke for us all when he replied to the Duc: ‘Fuck you, Dandy Legs. Eat up boys we’re leaving. There’s nothing in this deal for us!’ Cartwright walks away but collapses after a few steps. Father Mika rushes over but is unable to wake Cartwright from the deep unconscious state he’s fallen into.

The Scroll of the Left Hand
We don’t have it. The Duc says us he doesn’t have it. So where is the Scroll of the Left hand? Our only salvation. The Duc assures us we know exactly where it is.
‘No, we don’t!’
‘Yes, you do. You have always known.’
‘Oh,’ exclaims Ludwig, remembering the inaccessible trapdoor at Mehmet Makray’s Islington shop. It had always bothered him—what was so important to Makryat that he would conceal it behind a trapdoor with such an intricate lock.

Time to Think
No rush. The Duc invited us to explore his beautiful (creepy) cathedral while we make our minds up about agreeing to deliver the goods, so we might yet live. At a gesture from the Duc, Cartwright suddenly wakes. We take a wander.

The Chapel
In the chapel several figures kneel in a circle. Most are robed and hooded. Even with hoods it’s obvious that some of them have no faces—just smooth skin devoid of features. One young woman, in a plain Edwardian dress, has no hands. One man has a cavity in his chest. A ball of energy glows faintly in place of his absent heart. When asked about their conditions, the man with the cavity in his chest informs us his wife is lost and his heart is broken. The Edwardian woman tells us she was judged by the Prince. She was hungry. She also says, ‘The Prince’s promises are as empty as the dream he weaves and his honour is like his skin—a patchwork.’

The Library in the Cellar
Pierre descends the stone steps to what he believed would be the crypt. Instead, he stands in a long gallery full of books. There are no candles, no lamps and yet the gallery is adequately lit as if by supernatural means. He peruses the books. They are old and bound in cracked leather. On a reading stand at the end of the gallery an intriguing tome rests, its pages open. The pages are filled with diagrams and passages written in French. The rambling passages are in the form of journal entries spanning several years. Their messages are many but the more recent are preparatory rites and phrases. The diagrams are annotations, showing the pieces of the Simulacrum fitted to the Duc’s anatomical frame. The last written entry of text reads simply: ‘I shall be next.’ This tome was the working manual of the Duc. The others join Pierre and between them they try to remove the book, pick up the stand, deface the text, tear the pages, burn the tome—all to no avail. The book proved impervious to damage and impossible to lift.

The Campanologist
A discordant peal of bells assaulted our ears from one of several bell towers. We investigate the awful din. A weeping bell ringer with knotted and scarred hands pulls at a rope. His dried flesh is a stitched patchwork of many stolen pieces in a range of skin tones. The disputatious bong of the bell above is hellish. With each ring, everyone wanted to clap their hands to their ears (or strangle the bell ringer) to put an end to the assault of the terrible noise. Letty asks the man ‘Why do you ring the bell?’
Bong!
‘I am condemned to ring the bell until my hands have worn away.’
‘Why so?’
‘I failed my prince.’
Bong!

Time to Face the Jigsaw Prince
The Duc is waiting. Letty tells everyone we should just hand over the loot. She’s tired of all this crap and just wants to get healed. Everyone else questions the wisdom of complying with a dangerous psychopath. The Duc wants an answer. We cross our fingers behind our backs and promise the Duc we’ll take the items to Hamstead Heath at sunset tomorrow and leave them at the mound. Our duplicitous oaths have been extracted. The Duc waves a hand and the cathedral door opens.

Wakey, wakey
We step through and instantly wake up in the back of Bill the cabbie’s Hackney carriage. Bill the Cabbie is asleep sat at his driver’s post and the cab stands beside the kerb, outside 3 Brophy Lane. We gather our things (our treasures are all here) and step out onto the pavement.

I’ve been notified this afternoon that Doug and Jim won’t be coming tonight. In addition to Stew who is on his jollies that makes 3 players down. Given where you are on the scenario I don’t think it’s fair that we continue with the game tonight without those players, so I think we need to do something else.

I know it is late in the day but is there something anyone else can run tonight?

As a reminder there is no Orient Express game this Thursday (28th) as I am unable to make it to the Club

IV THE SHORT VERSION

Saturday 23rd February 1923
3.45 PM. Brophy Lane.
Boarded up. The sigil of the upturned ankh.
Cartwright breaks the door down.
Pierre bounces an apple off Cartwright’s head.
Like lemmings we follow each other in, and collapse one by one.
The trapdoor.
The Mims Sahis.
The supernatural cellar, with the supernatural pattern.
An old friend waits for us upstairs.
George Banks suffers an horrific facial wound.
Cartwright the brave saves Banks from certain death.
Banks delivers the killing blow… and collapses into madness.

IV THE LONG VERSION

Saturday 23rd February 1923

3 Brophy Lane
Mehmet Makryat’s emporium of crap is boarded up tight, front and back. Banks was determined to climb the rear wall to access the backyard but we needed to do this surreptitiously so as not to attract unwanted attention. Unfortunately, the normally quiet street was unusually busy with a full-blown marching parade of disgruntled women from the Islington Women’s Institute preceded by a Sally Army brass band and a massed audience of supporters lining the pavements. Banks had to time his climb perfectly. Eventually he dropped over the wall and almost broke his neck landing on piles of old junk.

Break for Supplies
The rear of the property was boarded up, just like the front. On some of the boardings was etched and an image of an upturned ankh. A ward. The building is well-secured. There’s no way to break in without proper tools (or bravado). We disperse to fetch weapons and burglar’s tools. Except for Cartwright, who instead spends his time, first borrowing £20 from an old friend who runs a local magic shop, second avoiding conversations about going to see his wife, and third splashing the cash on a new sword-cane.

Back at Brophy Lane
5.45PM. Its dark. Parade over, the street is quiet. We notice that, not only does the boarding at the rear of the property have the mark of the upturned ankh, the front does too. Etched above the door-lock. Probably a magical ward. Not good. Grasping at hope, we recall that when Selim Makryat died, the demon possession of the Express locomotive was ended. Perhaps with both Selim and Mehmet dead, the magical power imbued in the wards will now be dispelled. Cartwright tests the theory, and ignoring the offer of a crowbar puts his shoulder to the front door of the shop—and smashes straight through.

It’s a kind of Magic
As he crashes int the shop and lands sprawled on the floor with a terribly bruised shoulder, Cartwright feels a tingling through his entire body. He’s just burst his way through an invisible barrier of arcane force, and it’s trying to fry his brain and seize his muscles. Luckily, he manages to shrug off the feeling without too much ill-effect. Pierre pulls an apple from his pocket and tosses it across the threshold. As it passes through the, now open, doorway it turns from vibrant green to manky brown and bounces off a woozy Cartwright’s head as he’s struggling to get back to his feet in the shop.

The Power of Prayer
Father Mika utters a prayer and with faith in his heart, steps into the shop after Cartwright and the apple. He feels an overwhelming oppression of energy as he does, but pushes through the unknowable, intangible, invisible barrier. Percy and Banks follow next—and both collapse unconscious as they succumb to the residual energy of the ward. Several minutes pass before Letty and Ludwig cross the threshold too, both suffer a similar fate to Percy and Banks before them. Perhaps none of them have enough faith like Mika does.

Don’t you open that trapdoor—‘cos there’s something down there
Eventually everyone recovers their wits and they set about investigating the premises. Ludwig goes straight to where the trapdoor is, pulling aside a rug that had been laid over it. It had been several weeks since they’d seen it, and there it was again with its intricate patterns and it upturned ankh. Previously they had thought it to be a complicated mechanical lock, but now they understood its true nature—the lock was sealed with magic. They puzzled over it for a few moments and then Ludwig had an idea: perhaps the solution was to tackle magic with magic. He produced the Mims Sahis. At first the trapdoor repelled the Mims Sahis like two opposing magnets, but then Ludwig forced the Mims Sahis home—slicing into the lock like a hot knife through butter. The upturned ankh shattered. A burst of arcane force blew out the front and back doors of the property and immediately the background of oppressive warding force dissipated. Ludwig lifted the trapdoor.

When is a cellar not a cellar?
At the bottom of a short flight of stone steps was a cellar space lit by a phosphorescent blue light. The cellar was an expansive empty space. It had a smooth concrete floor and it was several times the size of the footprint of the shop above. It was completely plain, except for a single feature of note—an intricate and wholly disturbing pattern etched into the floor near the cellar’s centre. It was disturbing, not in an overtly visual sense but in an inscrutable psychological manner. The patten was just—wrong. As was the existence of the cellar. It wasn’t contemporary with the usual structure of a Victorian London basement. It was too plain in its construction, too clinical, too big and supernaturally illuminated in a soft blue.

The puzzling pattern
Ludwig took a nick-nack from a shelf in the shop above and brining it into the cellar, tossed it onto the pattern. Immediately the nick-nack was launched at terrific speed straight up where it smashed against the ceiling. ‘Ourageous! I wouldn’t stand on that if I were you,’ he advised the others. Pierre wonder what was above the pattern, not in the cellar but in the building above. He went up through the shop and to the first floor, and peered up the stairs. One of the small, first floor rooms must be aligned directly over the pattern.

An old friend
Letty, Percy and Banks crept up the stairs to investigate. Ludwig and Mika remained in the cellar to watch the pattern. Pierre positioned himself in the shop where he could communicate with both groups as a go-between. Banks led the way to the upstairs and was shocked and horrified to come face-to-face with a terrible monstrosity. It dropped from a space somewhere close to the ceiling, but a space surely not large enough to conceal the larger-than-life monster. It’s as if it had just popped through out of a shadowy portal from another world. It was amorphous, with glistening, black, wet-ink skin, and oversized externalised viscera with a long trailing bowel that dripped foul fluids that burned and smoked on the bare floorboards of the landing as they dripped. Its strong but spindly arms ended in inhuman claws and its ghastly face, contorted in pain and anger was the face of James Beddows.

Oooh! That’s going to smart in the morning!
Banks discharged his .32 auto. The bullet ripped through the monster’s viscera, spraying green ichors across the wall behind. The ichors burned and smoked. The creature retaliated by swinging its trailing bowel like a club. Putrid fluids coating the bowel splashed Banks before the physical bowel made crushing contact, opening a terrible facial wound. The rank fluids dripped into the open wound and seared his flesh. The bowel strike was immediately followed by a rake of the Beddows monster’s claw, which ripped off the tip of Banks’ nose. Letty screamed. And screamed. And screamed.

Goodbye Mr Beddows
The Beddows monster leaned over the terrified investors. Its face loomed large, hissing and snarling. The monster reared up ready to deliver the killing blow to the flailing George Banks. Cartwright stepped into the fray, interposing himself between the monster and Banks. He bloodied his new sword-cane—thrusting it upwards and running the creature through. And then a gunshot rang out. Beddow’s face exploded with the force of the point blank shot. The creature collapsed to the floor. Banks, his face horrifically disfigured, his eyes wide and his body convulsing, held a smoking gun in his trembling hand. As the destroyed creature fell upon him, he shrieked and frothed at the mouth, until he lapsed into a stupor.

V THE SHORT VERSION

Saturday 23rd February 1923
5.45 PM. Brophy Lane.
The pattern repeats on the study floor.
The missing school teacher hiding in the wardrobe.
The Scroll of the Left Hand.
The Ritual of Cleansing.
Simon Percy suffers an horrific end.
The Second Coming of Mehmet Makryat.
The scramble for the Simulacrum.
A god amongst us.
Father Mika meets his maker
We’ve escaped! …or so we thought.
We’re back in the room.
None shall wear the Simulacrum.
Sucked off.
The end.

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